Daily News Brief: The ONE BILLION DOLLAR Edition!

Microsoft Sued for...ONE BILLION DOLLARS!

Conjuring up memories of Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, the European Union court dismissed Microsoft's antitrust appeal, upholding a $689.9 million fine. The court didn't agree with MS's model of tying new apps into the Windows OS, claiming that such tactics "prevent the market from functioning properly and consumers are entitled to benefit from choice and more innovative products." The EU hopes that the unprecedented ruling will lead to a decline in Microsoft's 95 percent market share stranglehold and spur competition. Naturally, Microsoft disagrees, calling the ruling disappointing, stating the verdict gives the Commission "quite broad power and quite broad discretion." Adding to the tally of fines, Microsoft's received an additional 280.5 million euros penalty (that's a tad over $390 million USD). Despite the enormous penalties, investors remain confident while shares dropped just 1.14 percent after the court's ruling.

Adobe's Revenue Approaches...ONE BILLION DOLLARS!

Continuing our billion dollar news coverage, Adobe announced record revenue of $851.7 million for the fiscal third quarter. That represents quite a jump from this time last year, which saw Adobe recording $602 million, marking a 41 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Adobe attributes the financial fortunes to "outstanding Creative Suite 3 adoption and continued Acrobat momentum." Why on earth would this be interesting? Well, since times are so good in the Adobe camp, you can now guiltlessly download the leaner, faster, and free PDF reader from Foxit Software and enjoy a healthyclear conscience!

Penryn Before Thanksgiving, Priced Below ONE BILLION DOLLARS!

Everyone knows that Intel's Penryn is just around the corner, and now we have a date to confirm it. Paul Otellini ended speculation by confirming the launch of Penryn based Xeons will take place on November 12. The 45nm architecture brings 410 million transistors to the table, compared to 291 million found on Conroes, along with a whopping 12MB of L2 cache. Speeds will range from 2.0GHz to 3.16GHz at launch, with pricing anywhere from $209 to $1,172.

Real Workers Plan Virtual Strike in Second Life

Looking to send a, um, strong message to IBM, riled up workers of the Italian labor Union RSU (Rappresentenza Sindacale Unitaria) are taking their protests to Second Life in the first ever virtual strike. The tiff started over negotiations to renew IBM's Italian internal collective agreement in which workers sought what they describe as a small salary increase. Instead, IBM cancelled their productive results benefit, worth approximately 1000 Euros, or nearly $1400 USD. With help from the UNI (Union Network International), those wishing to participate in the virtual strike can pick up a strike kit, which includes picket signs and t-shirts. No word yet on whether or not The Sims Online was ever in the running to host the strike.

USB to get Major Speed Boost

Intel announced at IDF (Intel Developer Forum) the formation of the USB 3.0 Promoter Group, a collaborative effort along with Microsoft, HP, NEC, NXP Semiconductors, and Texas Instruments to superspeed the USB interconnect. The new spec promises to deliver over 10 times the speed of today's transfers, and will sport optimizations for lower power consumption and improved protocol efficiency. Like USB 2.0, the new version will be backwards compatible, with the completed 3.0 specification expected in the first half of 2008.

Affordable Blu-ray?

The Blu-ray format holds some distinct advantages over HD-DVD, but pricing has never been one of them. Enter Pioneer and Mitsubishi, who announced the development of a Blu-ray disc using organic dye for the recording layer, significantly cutting into manufacturing costs. Dubbed Low to High (LTH), the technology can be applied by modifying existing CD-R and DVD-R manufacturing equipment, negating the need for costly new plants. But there's a caveat, and a big one too: The current crop of Blu-ray drives aren't able to read the new BD-R discs, serving as a reminder to early adopters that there's a benefit in waiting for tech to mature and pricing to settle (just ask those with an iPhone). Future firmware updates could possibly change the current compatibility outlook, but those looking to jump into the Blu-ray camp may want to wait until Spring 2008 when the new LTH drives are expected to ship.

NVidia Releases New Forceware Drivers for Vista

Those waiting for nVidia's newest Forceware drivers to pass WHQL certification need wait no longer. The 163.69 drivers are available now, in both 32-bit and 64- bit Vista flavoring. Release highlights include improved SLI performance and compatibility, HD video post- processing for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 HD content on the 8500 and 8600 series GPU, and improved compatibility for The Way It's Meant To Be Played games, such as Crysis, Quake Wars, Bioshock, and others. May the Forceware be with you, and give you better luck than this editor had trying to run the Bioshock demo under a 64 bit version of Vista...

Comments

Type"ohs" or not, I enjoy the reading. And if I do catch errors, it makes me feel better knowing that I'm not dumb enough not to recognize it. I know spell check can only be so good, but nobody is perfect and I don't even blame the professionals for the goofs they make, or anyone else for that matter. Lord knows I make e-nuf of them myself.

I certainly appreciate the daily dose of news, but it would be great if somebody would take the time to proofread the posts before they go up. Every day there is an assortment of typos/grammar errors/unclear statements. These are more the type of thing I'd expect to find on some teenager's blog than on a website written by journalism professionals. Downloading Foxit Reader will allow me to guiltlessly enjoy my healthy "conscious", will it? Are you sure it's not my clear "conscience" that I will enjoy? And how 'bout the statement, "Adding to the tally, Microsoft's received 280.5 million euros (that's a tad over $390 million USD)." Giving you the benefit of the doubt on that "apostrophe s" at the end of "Microsoft" (hey, that could have been a contraction), the sentence seems to say that somebody just gave Microsoft 280.5 million euros. Can I get some of that action? I can only guess from the context of the rest of the paragraph that you're saying that Microsoft received some sort of penalties or fines of 280.5 million euros, but if you're giving me the news, I shouldn't be reduced to guessing what you're talking about. I wouldn't have bothered to rant if these were isolated incidents, but this is pretty typical of every day's news brief. And in a world where grammar, punctuation and spelling are going to hell faster than you can text, "wer U @?" it would be nice to think that professional journalists could be held to a higher standard.

Unfortunately, typos and grammar mishaps are bound to occur on lengthy blog posts. Unlike articles appearing in the magazine, the blogs don't pass through multiple editors where the errors have a better chance of being caught. And when it comes to the daily news, there's no opportunity to walk away from it for a day and revisit the writing under a refreshed pair of eyes before going live, unless we were to rename it Daily Two Day Old News Brief. That's not to excuse silly errors that ultimately get posted, but do understand that blogs are a different breed than magazine articles.

Thanks for being an adult. An attitude of "I screwed up, and I'll fix it" seems to be so uncommon these days that to find one is a pleasant surprise. I've been a subscriber since the days of Boot, and it's probably because I think so very highly of MaximumPC (and the new-and-constantly-improving website) that the errors bug me so much. But thanks for not hitting me with something like, "why are you such a jerk about people speelling good? You sux0rS!!!1!!!"

That said, my first complaint was about your use of "conscious" instead of "conscience". And I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I saw that you'd changed the adjective, but not the actual noun in question. Perhaps I shouldn't have changed the adjective in my example when I was bitching about the error in the first place...